Posts Tagged ‘cut-out’
I’ve been busy with freelance commercial work and have neglected my blog. Plus I had to upgrade WordPress and migrate to a new host, which I just completed this week. With the migration and upgrade complete I’ll be back to posting regularly. Anyway, above is a color comp, cut-out design and character design I put together for a treatment I submitted last year for a Neil Diamond music video through RW Media. I didn’t get the gig :(
My entry for Illustration Friday, ‘Fast.’ Created in Photoshop and After Effects.
Detail
Detail
I approached the design of the illustration as though I were going to animate it. I drew the cut-out character, props and scenery on paper in pencil, and then pen and ink – archer, bow, arrow, tree etc. Once scanned into the computer I colored and textured the drawings in Photoshop and then imported all the cut-outs into After Effects where I set up 2 scenes; one of the archer in the forest, the other of the arrows. Once the scenes were complete I rendered them out and brought them back into Photoshop to create the final comic-styled illustration.
I thought I’d explain the design process for my characters from my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along.’
In the image above you can see the original character design drawing, top left. All the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ started on paper, first as blue pencil drawings, then as pen and ink. I scanned the drawing into photoshop and tweaked the levels so that I the texture of the paper is visible – I really wanted to make the ‘Dead All Along’ world seem as if it was a paper world, almost as though an Edward Gorey inspired book had come to life.
Once in Photoshop, I ‘cut out’ each part of the character so that it can be animated in a cut-out animation style within After Effects. This character didn’t have to animate too much so it only has 9 separate bits, including 2 heads for the blink (eye open, eye closed). You can see the separate body bits in the bottom right of the above image. I cut and separate the body bits using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop creating a loose outline of the body part.
For coloring, I like to color in Photoshop. I use Photoshop because I can easily combine textures with the original character drawing and also because I like to be able to experiment with color ideas. I typically use textures in my coloring process and the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ were also colored with a lot of textures. I keep a texture library of textures on my computer that are scans and photographs of textures, patterns etc. One of my favorite set of textures is a book of origami paper that I scanned in – I used several of these origami papers to color and texture the characters in ‘Dead All Along.’ I’m also fond of the Maxon collection of comic patterns, and I have several of these scanned that I use. Below you can see a screen-shot of my texture library (top), a screen-shot of the textures and layers of the coloring process in Photoshop (middle), and a sample of the texture palette I used for the bird (and yes, that is a wallpaper pattern from the 1970’s :)
Yesterday I released the animated music video for the song ‘Dead All Along’ by Ceri Frost. Today ‘Dead All Along’ was featured on Vimeo’s Staff Picks channel :)
‘Dead All Along’, By Ceri Frost, Dir by Giles Timms (2:13)
Enchanted by a pixie, a child called Yorick enters a magical kingdom, but when Yorick returns he finds his world ravaged by time. Made at the Animation Workshop at UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film and Television, 2009.
The animated music video is set in a hand drawn pen and ink world inspired by Edward Gorey and animated in a cut-out style. Compositing and animation in After Effects.
You can view the video on vimeo here:
Dead All Along from Giles Timms on Vimeo.
Another vector cut-out created in Flash. This is a Tadahiro Uesugi inspired girl that I created for my Manifestation music video. She has 11 separate girly bits so that she can be animated in a cut-out style.
